During our visit to Indonesia, Santy and I had an opportunity to visit Tante Betsy.  She’s healthy and alert, and still remembers almost all of you.  She said hello to all of you.  Frans, her son, filled me in with the details of his dad’s passing.  According to him, Oom Arief was relatively healthy; he did not have any medical problem.  Frans was exercising outside when Oom Arief’s caregiver called him to come home because he had difficulty standing up.  But when Frans got home, Oom Arief had managed to stand up.  Frans then sat him on a couch with the caregiver next to him before he went downstairs to get something.  It’s then while he was downstairs, Oom Arief tilted to the side and took his last breath.  He slipped into his new home.

But there is something else that Frans told us.  The night before he passed, Oom Arief could not sleep.  He was awake virtually all night. When his caregiver asked him why he could not sleep, he replied, “I see angels.”  The following morning, he really met all the angels.  I believe that Oom Arief really saw angels because it was the kind of joke that he never made.  As you recall, he was a jovial man; he was always young at heart and liked to crack jokes.  But the one joke he never made was seeing the angels of God.  So, yes, he saw angels.

One of my favorite Bible verses is Matthew 5:8, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”  Oom Arief was in that group of believers whose hearts were pure.  I had never heard him say malice against anybody else; he always had something good to say about others.  And one more thing about him: He had the heart of a child.  Despite his advanced age, Oom Arief was always a little child of God.  That’s why, when I heard this, I thought how fitting it was for him to see God’s angels before God took him home the next morning.  God opened the window of heaven and let him peek. No wonder he could not sleep all night long; he was too excited.

Pastor Paul